His heart is with Phila.'s art

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's new director slipped into town Sunday night and spent yesterday speaking to reporters in the morning, holding a Q&A with employees, lunching with senior staff, and taking a peek at the museum's Brancusis, Mondrians and one of the newest works in the collection, Bruce Nauman's The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.

Then he was back on a plane.

Timothy Rub, 57, becomes the museum's 13th director in September, succeeding the late Anne d'Harnoncourt, but for the next few months he'll have a foot in two worlds, finishing up his three years leading the Cleveland Museum of Art as he acquaints himself with all things Philadelphia.

Where will he live - in the city or near it? Will he travel to Venice to see the Nauman show at the U.S. Pavilion curated by the Art Museum before it closes in the fall? Does the museum's recent admissions hike put it out of reach for some potential visitors?

"Right now I am taking it one week at a time," Rub said yesterday.

He is at that awkward stage in a new leader's tenure - perhaps wanting to talk substantively about his ideas for the job, yet wary of committing too much too early - but he is happy to say one thing quite unequivocally:

He's thinking of Philadelphia long-term.

"I am here for as long as Philadelphia will have me and I can do wonderful things," he said. "There is no other place I would like to be, no other place I can imagine myself. This is one of the great museums in the country. There is a lot of great work to be done here in terms of the [architect Frank] Gehry project. So much work in terms of strengthening the staff and resources. There is no better place for me to be."

Clevelanders might have some suggestions. The comments board on the Plain Dealer's Web site lit up yesterday - some readers angry at Rub for leaving so soon, others more generous about the decision but sorry to see him go nonetheless.

"If you were to put this in sports perspective so the lugheads around here could understand it, it's like losing LeBron James to free agency," said one post.

Rub said the thing that attracted him to Philadelphia was the art - he's particularly enamored of contemporary art and looks forward to developing that part of the museum's collection with an active hand in acquisitions.

"Any director who says he does not want to be involved in the acquisitions process is fibbing - it's what museums do. New opportunities are always arising. If you don't pay attention to that you don't keep the collection lively and reinventing itself."

It was contemporary art that got Rub interested in art in the first place. He was an English major at Middlebury College in Vermont when he had to take a distribution course. He chose 20th-century art and saw for the first time works of environmental artists such as Robert Smithson.

"I went, 'This is just an incredible thing - what are they doing?' I changed my major at the end of my sophomore year."

From then on, Rub made it his business to see art.

"I began to go to museums on a regular basis, to train my eye. It's hard work. It's a challenge to get to know a collection, and there are artists who don't reveal themselves to you immediately."

The Philadelphia Museum of Art became a regular destination.

"It's one of the places where I began to look seriously at the visual arts. It's an institution I've known for a very long time. Of all the major museums in the country it's the one for which I feel the greatest fondness and affinity."

Good thing, if he's going to be here for as long as the city will have him.